The Deceivers are excited to continue with open alliance posts for 2024.
Links
More updates to come
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Season Specific Links:
CAD: Onshape
Github: FRC4392/FRC2024 · GitHub
Youtube Playlist: Youtube
TikTok: TikTok - Make Your Day
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Offseason updates:
Super Pit:
We developed a super pit based on 973 and 5460’s super pit design.
The left cart holds a 72in Husky tool box and 24 Stanley Organizers
The right cart holds a battery cart, mini fridge, >32 clear organizers and eventually a drill organizer will be added.
Both carts contain electrical outlets, actuate up and down using linear actuators have LED strips for lighting.
Mini Robot:
We built a mini robot using parts off our 2022 robot when it was disassembled.
We believe this is the smallest FRC legal swerve drive robot. All of the parts for this robot were taken from our 2022 robot except a new base plate, electronics board, battery board, and stand offs for each board. The base is 10.75inx10.75in and from the plate to top of the battery is very close to 10.75in. There is some video of the swerve in the video linked at the end of the post.
Deceivers Swerve 4.0:
We are continuing to improve on our swerve. We currently have a version 4 that is close to completion, but still has some details that need sorting. The goals of this design where to ensure compatibility with both Krakens and Neo Vortexes, allow use with a 3in Colson wheel, fix issues with bolts stripping on plastic and make wheels easier to swap.
CAD is available here: Onshape
There will likely be updates made still tonight/tomorrow if we plan on using it.
Our media team has put together this video to recap our offseason:
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Kickoff Thoughts:
Field is complicated. We have very little space to store field elements so we are not a fan of complicated fields.
The animation made the game seem much more complicated than it is, not saying that it isn’t complicated.
Many strategies are available.
Game pieces are interesting, but not a nightmare to deal with
Note in the Trap is hard
Buddy Climb is hard
Full bumpers are a good thing, I am worried some teams might miss it though
Steamworks style gear cycles where you don’t have to stop at the feeder station and wait will be valuable to reduce congestion
The game piece is super flexible and allows easy pickup, indexing may lead to issues, we haven’t tried that yet though.
We have a CAD document with Prototype designs available here: Onshape
We designed a double roller intake that seems to work well at picking up game objects. Next step is to make it faster and test the ability to go over the bumper.
One of our goals this year is to rank first at an event, so we went to look at soloing RP. This year a single robot soloing is incredibly difficult. It will require buddy climb (hard), Note in trap (hard), Scoring 15-18 game pieces (hard). We will have to look more into it to see what is actually achievable for us.
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Week 1 update:
We built a couple field elements. They are big and hard to store. We don’t have a place we can permanently store field elements so large field elements are very annoying.
We built a couple variations of an intake. All of them just seem to work. These game pieces just seem to go where you want them to.
Intake grip material: We have tried cat tongue grip tape, silicone tubes and just raw aluminum. The friction of the game piece is quite low on aluminum so it caused our intake to jam when not on the rollers. Cat Tongue and Silicone work really well. I would assume that latex tubing used by some would work, but we can’t test that.
Intake compression: Our first intake had quite a bit of compression and would jam. After testing we went to 1/8in compression for the aluminum to aluminum intake and it has largely worked. We used 1/8in wall silicone so that would add up to 1/4in compression to floor and backing.
Over vs Under: We have decided to go over. We have had stability problems in the past with smaller wheel bases and don’t want to sacrifice our wheel base to do the grasshopper extended frame. We also want a full width intake that won’t jam with drive wheels. These two factors largely led us to an over bumper intake.
We built a few mockups of a shooter. We geared 1:1 off a Neo and started with 1.25in tubes for the shooter. We found the surface speed of the shooter was too slow and we didn’t get much range from it. We switched to a mishmash of 4in wheels we had on hand and it seemed to perform much better. We weren’t able to consistently make long range shot with that setup so we switched to 1.5:1 ratio on the shooter and that seemed to make it more consistent… We also found that spin does improve long range consistency. We plan to try a tapered 3d printed roller, but we tried to print it on 3 different printers and all failed in different ways. Still more testing on shooters to come
Trap: It’s hard but doable. The Remembrants “shamper” have led us to some ideas we will be testing this week.
Drivetrain: We plan on doing a 27inx27in frame with our custom swerve. It has started to be assembled. More details on that coming.
Here is a video recapping our week:
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This post is a week late, but here it goes.
Shooter: Many tweaks done, many more to come. We refined some of the build and tried out different wheel combinations. We found pretty good results with blue AM compliant wheels and Fairlane wheels. ! set on the left side, one set on the right. All 4in diameter. We found that these produce a good mix of shooting power and spin on the wheel. We can fairly consistently make shots from the wing line which is nice. We tested a full conical roller and the results were not good. The game piece would not come out straight and would flip in mid air. It’s possible that a split conical roller could do better, but we are. happy with the wheels.
Trap. The trap shooting videos that have been spread around gave us some ideas about possibly shooting into the trap. Possibly from the ground, but also possibly while hanging and holding the door open to eliminate the bottom roller of the “shamper” design. This needs to be tested when we get our climber ready
Amp. Looking at other robots, it looks like the amp can be shot into if you are at the right angle and block it from falling back out again. This is also something we want to expirement with to possibly eliminate the “shamper” roller.
Overall Architecture. We have finally decided on an overall architecture. We went through a few iterations.
- Jack in the Bot:
Basically Jack in the bot’s robot from last year. It could easily do the amp, and probably the trap, she shooter portion was iffy as there was not much room to hold the game piece.
This led us to
- Jack in The Bot + Shooter
Basically the same concept but with a separate shooter.
Thinking about it for a while, we weren’t super fond of the arm and making it able to move under the chain got complicated. Elevators simplify that, also only the the amp and trap mechanism needs to be raised, so the shooter could stay low. Which led us to
- Spectrum
Basically spectrums design. We started working on this at basically the same time spectrum posted theirs.
We had a few issues with this. We are usually heavy and have a hard time building light so we were worried about weight issues. There are a lot of different parts to this and can complicated fast, so we wanted to combine things and simplify a bit. This led us to our final choice
Shooter on a slanted elevator. This combines the elevator amp/trap mechanism with the pivoting shooter. It’s not necessarily simpler, but It is more achievable for us to build and hopefully lighter for us.
More progress to come, hopefully in the next few days. Here is our week 2 recap video:
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Are you still working on this concept? How is it going?
We are. We are a bit behind right now and our schooled closed last week due to sickness. Will try to make a post tonight. We will definitely have more info this weekend though.
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Things have been quite hectic for us. I appear to have missed the week 3 and 4 video updates. They are here:
Updates:
We are going with the slanted elevator to lift the shooter and brace off the stage while climbing. It is just a single carriage that slides up and down. The carriage holds a pivot point for the shooter and a gear box to drive the sector gear on the shooter.
The shooter/feeder assembly is coming along. The general design is a top/bottom flywheel shooter, a top bottom and side roller feeder, and a driven wheel to react with the stage. The shooter is intended to shoot the game pieces into the stage, but also score in the amp similar to the WCP CC or the grasshoppers amp scoring mechanism. You can do this same idea on the trap, if the door is held open. We plan to have a servo actuate arms to open the trap door after we climb and then eject the note similar to the amp.
We have changed our mind on the intake. The plan is to go under the bumper now. We will be moving ahead with an extended frame under the bumper intake. More planning is coming on this.
Climber is still a work in progress but our plan right now is to use two arms to climb.
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This is looking great so far! Your goal to achieve rank 1 at an event will be difficult seeing as your with Bravebots at one and Enginerds at the other, but I wish you luck and I’ll see you at CMU!
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We were able to accomplish a lot this past week. Still behind, but catching up.
Mainly manufacturing and assembly happening.
Here is a weekly recap video
Our krakens should be here today so things should hopefully be moving pretty quickly.
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to whom it may concern: I am not kgzak but I too speak for the trees.
not much has changed since the last post. as of now we have finished most of the machining and are working on assembly. week six involved working on the intake, week 7 has more intake and climber. the intake it mostly finished now and the climber is nearing completion. maybe it will even work
here are the recap videos for said weeks. more to come in the future
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One of my favorite events every year is the LSSU district event. So much space, nice people, tons of fun. This year was also quite stressful.
At home our robot was running great. Probably the least amount of issues pre week one we have had. We were feeling pretty confident and ready for LSSU.
Getting to the event, pit set up was super easy this year due to our super pit. Couple things to plug in and raise the tops and we were ready to go.
After pit setup we went through inspection. Took a little while for an inspector to be available but went through inspection quite quick. Then it was on to practice matches.
Our first practice match, our operators controller died so we were unable to do any shooting. Our friends on 1596 wanted their robot battle tested, so we offered to play defense on them during the match. After swapping the controller we went out to our second practice match and everything worked well for most of the match, but we did end up with CAN issues.
We spent the rest of the night going through all the can connectors. Possibly thinking the issue lied in the resistor on our cancoder, and unable to find a replacement, we rerouted our can to terminate in the PDH. In the pit everything looked great, so we felt prepared for the upcoming match.
QM 3:
Forgot to pick an auto…After that the robot seemed to work well, it was the first time we could really drive on carpet so the robot behaved a bit different. At about 55 seconds left in the match, we hit the wall and CAN errors…
Went back to the pit to try to find the CAN issue, we went through every can connector and were unable to find anything but still had can issues. With the robot unable to move we made the decision to be bypassed. In this years game, putting a dead robot on the field seems to be more of a hindrance to your own alliance than anything. You have the option to place it near the amp, near the subwoofer, or near the opponents source risking penalties.
QM 9:
Bypassed
We finally found that removing one of the spark flexes from the bus would get the can bus to come back. Swapped it for a new one and we had a bus again.
QM 16:
We forgot to mirror our auto so the robot ran to the side of the field crashing into the wall and dying. The power to our brainbox network switch came unplugged. Bit of hot glue fixed this for the future. I also want to thank 4391, 141, and 6558 for not repeatably hitting us when entering the source to rack up penalties even though they could have.
Put some hot glue on, fixed the auto mirroring issue and we were ready for the next match.
QM 24:
For the most part the robot worked. But if you watch carefully you can see out intake start to struggle towards the end.
Match appeared to go well, on to the next match
QM 30:
Intake failed in auto. Switching to direct feed saved up, but definitely slowed us down.
Intake failed due to a 3d printed pulley failing on the hex shaft. It ran a lot of practice so we just swapped it and went out again.
QM 37:
Intake pulley failed again. Went back to human feed
Went to the pit to try and figure out what to do about the intake. We didn’t have enough time to properly repair it and also managed to break the hub in one of our tubes. Went into the next match knowing we won’t have a ground intake.
QM 45:
Good match, robot did well even without a ground intake. we did experience a comm loss going under the stage, I think our Ethernet cord sometimes bumps the stage.
Everything seemed good so just had to finish fixing the intake.
QM 52:
Intake failed in auto and caused a note to be stuck forcing us to play defense. Our driver has never tried defense before so that is something we need to work on.
Fix intake, but properly this time? Two things were happening with out intake, our original pulley was printed on the markforged and was a strong pulley. All of our spares were pla or petg with very few walls so they failed much faster. We also found that the plates for our intake had been bent causing binding on the bottom roller of our intake. Bending these back made a huge difference and seemed to have fixed the issue. We were also out of pulleys, so we ended up sacrificing a roller on the intake, cutting it and using part of the roller as the pulley. The roller 3d print is much wider and has more contact with the hex shaft so it should hold up better until we can get new parts made.
QM 59:
robot worked, but major aiming issues.
We came back to the pit and did some tuning on the limelight. We were getting some glare in testing so we adjusted some settings to reduce it.
QM 70, 77, 82:
Due to now TBA video I can’t recall exactly what happened, but I can tell you the we had the return of the can errors. I will update when video is available.
We don’t know why and are unable to reproduce these errors in the pit. but we continued to go through everything to see if we could get them to go away or to get them to show up in the pit.
Despite our issues, we were selected as the first pick of the 4th seed. Our can errors continued to plague us in elims where we barely drove.
We found two issues throughout our investigation one of them only after the end of the event. I talk about them here CAN errors taking down entire bus
Main issues being black marks on the can wires inside of the spark flex
and a rivet that pierced the insulation of the negative wire going to a motor controller and contacting out belly pan.
Still not sure what to do about it. currently our plan is to essentially rewire the entire robot.
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In other news, we won our first ever Impact Award! The team has put in a ton of work into this award and it’s great to see everyone get recognition for it.
Here is a weekly recap video.
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Here is a short clip of us trying to make it fail.
